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Comment by sitta | Hacker News Reader

I do the opposite for my cat. He's a very affectionate boy. He likes to sleep with us, but we'd prefer he didn't because we have a small bed and it makes our sleep worse. So, my solution was to snuggle with him on our guest bed a half hour or so before we go to bed. Then, when I get up, he stays on the guest bed and sleeps the rest of the night.

You might think that he might just do this out of habit now, but if we go out in the evening and come back late enough that he doesn't get his snuggle time, he almost always shows up on our bed after we've gone to sleep.

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One thing that always freaks me out is how do you trust your cat to not scratch your face or maul your eyes out while you sleep (accidently or otherwise)?

Cats can be very affectionate. I have three cats and they all jockey to get in my lap whenever I'm sitting or lay on my stomach if I'm reclining reading a book.

People who know cats as unkind typically have only met cats unknown to them.

All of the cats I've ever had over the past forty plus years, have all been relatively affectionate, and most of them have been very affectionate. Sleeping on the bed wasn't a problem for most of them, but I was rather surprised when some decided they wanted to burrow all the way under the sheets to the bottom of the bed, or waking up to cold wet nose in the ear.

That's about the worst feline generated behaviour I've ever personally witnessed with our cats.

Because he/she is morphologically different from a mice. Good question though.

With the three cats I've had living with me, the closest I've come to getting my face attacked while sleeping was sometimes they walk over me, which is fine when they walk over my legs or torso, and uncomfortable when they walk over my groin or face. Usually there's some amount of motion or noise so I can get my arms up to protect my face or at least move the cat.

I haven't had the types of cats that just attack their owners with no provocation though. All three did have the thing where sometimes they get upset by something that is impercetible to humans and swat at apparently nothing and then run away. That's not usually too stealthy though, and you can usually avoid getting attacked in the face.

Of all the cats I've known over the decades, I've only ever known one that would curl up on top of someone's face while that person was sleeping (not my cat). That cat did cause quite a bit of trauma on multiple occasions, but I believe my friends found a solution for that. At certain times, I believe that my friend was woken up by his wife struggling to breathe, and so he picked up the cat and tossed it across the room. Do that a few times, and I think the cat tends to learn.

Of the cats I've actually had myself, only one of them has ever shown any interest in attacking anything related to our faces. It was actually rather terrifying to see the look on her face when she was a tiny kitten, and she spotted her reflection in our eyeballs for the first time. This was clearly a toy she needed to play with. But those damn glasses were in the way, so she had to try to bite them and pull them off. It took us a while, but we discovered that she didn't like puffs of air being blown into her face, so we used that technique to disabuse her of any notion of that kind.

We don't allow the current crop to sleep with us at night, but that was more because as kittens they needed to get used to the new room and the new house after we adopted them, and we have too much junk on the floor of our master bedroom, and we didn't want them climbing under the bed and getting covered in dust bunnies, or maybe peeing on the stuff on the floor, or whatever. These are our first cats we've ever had that we have not allowed to sleep with us at night.

Frankly, the problem of cats sleeping on our face or attacking our face is just not a problem we've ever really had to deal with, over the many different cats we've had over the decades.

You said the key word already: trust. Trust is earned over time, whether between humans or between cats and humans.

Growing up, I had a lot of cats around the house and now with a family of my own we have a pair of kitties. In many years of living with cats this has never been a problem. Our kitties have learned that they can trust us humans to be respectful, to treat them well, and to take care of them, and in return we trust that they won't randomly attack us.

Also, despite being solitary hunters, cats are actually social animals. They will learn to give and take social cues. At worst when I've annoyed a cat, they'll typically express it first by a light swat with sheathed claws; that's signal enough for me that they want to be left alone till they get over it.

(In practice, though, my biggest problem with cats on the bed is overheating; I woke up this morning with my feet sandwiched between our two cats.)

I've had a zoo of animals my whole life and never has this question entered my mind. The only animals I've had on my face while asleep are hamsters that would routinely find ways of escaping their cages and would come and run across my face as soon as they got out (I do not know why) and then I would wake up and spend an hour trying to coax them out of a hiding place to put them back.

That's not something that normal cats do.

Cats do treat humans as play partners, and frequently scratch the hands and legs in such activity. But I've never experienced more than a boop on the face, from something like five cats (across decades).

He probably just wants a warm bed to sleep in.

Doesn't fit the data - if he's already been sleeping, his bed will be warm, and he wouldn't have the incentive to get up and change beds.

I think there is some truth in what stevage said. Usually when we come home the cats get up and are unsettled due to the change in routine. I try to get them settled on the guest bed again before going to bed myself, but this doesn't always work if they're really amped up. If I am able to get them settled, he won't sleep with us (the other cat isn't as interested in sleeping with us), but, if I can't, he'll likely show up in our bed later.

So, it is likely just a matter of getting him comfortable sleeping somewhere warm so that he isn't interested in moving to our bed.

Edit: Having said that, before I started this routine, he _would_ come up to bed if he was sleeping somewhere else already on a normal night in. So, I don't know.

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